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A group of UK fusion experts, including three from CCFE, recently visited Chinese facilities to discuss collaboration opportunities, on a trip funded by the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

The delegation consisted of CCFE Director Steve Cowley, Chief Technologist Tom Todd, and mechanical engineer David Hancock, together with Howard Wilson from the University of York and Kostya Trachenko from Queen Mary University of London.

During the one-week trip, the delegates visited several fusion research organisations throughout China, which are collectively known as China's Fusion Energy Excellence Centre. Amongst these were two facilities in Beijing, the China International Fusion Energy Program Execution Centre (which is the centre for Chinese work on ITER) and the China Institute of Atomic Energy.

They also travelled to the Institute of Plasma Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei – where amongst the experts they met was Professor Jiangang Li, who previously worked at CCFE on the COMPASS fusion device – and the University of Science and Technology China. The final stop on their tour was the Capital of Sichuan Province, Chengdu, to visit the South-Western Institute of Physics Centre for Fusion Science and the University of Sichuan.

“We all found the trip immensely stimulating on a number of technical, political and cultural levels, and very many collaborative opportunities arose in the discussions,” said Tom Todd. “These included CCFE gaining access to experimental work on China's superconducting divertor tokamak EAST, while Chinese physicists could participate in the Super X divertor work on MAST Upgrade; a good example of the common ground between the two research programmes."

A desire to set up a student exchange programme at Masters and PhD level between CCFE and Chinese research institutes and universities was also discussed at the different organisations.